Cooperative shoppers get food with a history

There is a story behind every item sold through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, said Bob Waldrop, the co-op's president and general manager. But no mysteries.

Created in 2003, the food cooperative has grown to 1,800 members, including producers of Oklahoma-grown products and buyers who pay a one-time $51.75 fee to belong to the co-op.

"People who join the Oklahoma Food Co-op, they want food with a story,” Waldrop said. "So the producer who is selling food is also selling his or her own story. ... A story or narrative is an important aspect of how we do business.”

The food cooperative began with a germ of an idea by Waldrop, who sought to "reconnect” rural and urban Oklahoma through the relationships between consumers and food producers. The cooperative has its own story, Waldrop said.

"It's a story of people who got together against a lot of expert advice and organized a unique business association of both producers and customers in order to reweave that connection that once brought rural Oklahoma and urban Oklahoma together,” he said.

Waldrop sold producers seeking new markets for their Oklahoma grown products on the idea and built a base of buyers who wanted a direct connection to the source of their food supply.

Each month producers list their products and take orders over the food co-op's Internet site at oklahomafood.coop. The goods are sorted and delivered to one of 38 pickup sites across the state, or they can be delivered if buyers are unable to travel to the pickup site.

The Oklahoma Food Cooperative is unique among such ventures in that both buyers and producers belong to the co-op Waldrop said.

"In the food co-op we have found a way for people from diverse backgrounds to come together around a table of fellowship, a table of food to find some unity in the simple act of buying their groceries,” he said.

A founding producer member was Kim Barker, who maintains a herd of about 100 cows, 300 sheep and 200 "free range” chickens on his 1,500-acre Walnut Creek Farms near Waynoka.

Barker has seen his sales grow from $150 for the first month of the co-op's operation in 2003 to about $2,000 a month today. He serves as vice president for producers on the cooperative's board of directors and shares the same vision for the venture as Waldrop.

While the co-operative takes a 10 percent fee from producers and adds on a 5 percent charge to buyers, the purpose of the fees is to cover operational expenses, not profit, he said.

"We're just set up to facilitate the business between the buyer and the seller and make the farm-to-city connection here,” Barker said. "Along with growing a market for the co-op, we're also creating farmers.”

One of the first buyer members in the cooperative was Shauna Struby, a freelance writer and Web designer who was intrigued by the opportunity to hear those food stories and meet the producers. The nation's industrialized system of agriculture and use of pesticides and chemicals raise a food safety concern with her.

"It's important to me to buy food not contaminated by those chemicals,” Struby said. "For those reasons, I like to read (about) or talk to the producers about how they raise their chickens or raise their cows or raise their vegetables.

"It's also important to me that that (process) also be humane,” Struby said.

All of which means that buyers such as Struby want to hear the stories of sellers such as Barker.

"To know the farmer is to know their story,” he said.

"A story or narrative is an important aspect of how we do business.”